File under: Brilliant turns of phrase by jaded academics

From a good friend, colleague, and co-author - Charlie Kaylor

"Student presentations are the Ninth Circle of Hell. All movement ceases except the slowly fanning wings of Satan."

Reporting live from the e-Social Science Doctoral Colloquium

Finally. After attending a steady stream of conferences, doctoral summer schools and colloquia, NSF and other sponsored symposia and workshops, et cetera - all of which left me with the impression that cyberinfrastructure/e-science research is focused solely on computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians - all the high-paradigm sciences...there has been a change of pace.

Today, I get to spend a full day in a room of other social scientists who are thinking about these issues (cyberinfrastructure, cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, social examinations of online science-based work, network dynamics in research, and a host of other cool and engaging topics that don't make me fall asleep), and my faith has been restored. True, it remains to be seen how much of the funding pie the people in this room capture over time. Still, knowing that there is a group of people out there, at the same stage I am, and who will likely be some fantastic contemporaries, collaborators, and friends over the course of a career - this is what I needed right now, just as disillusionment was about to ossify.